


un truc marrant, l'amour

by lionor



Category: Versailles (TV 2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Diary/Journal, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 18:07:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14699499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionor/pseuds/lionor
Summary: Fabien had been able to guess, when he’d held her as she was dying, as she grasped desperately at the strange beads in her hand. She knew. As the light left her eyes they still screamed with knowing.





	un truc marrant, l'amour

It was years before he realized how much she had known. Fabien had been able to guess, when he’d held her as she was dying, as she grasped desperately at the strange beads in her hand. She knew. As the light left her eyes they still screamed with knowing. 

But it wasn’t until he’d gone back and found the notes that he realized just how much she had figured out. Of course, he’d been to her little house since she’d died, kept an eye on it to see that thieves never entered it. But at first, he didn’t have the heart to touch her books. He wouldn’t have known what they meant. Claudine seemed innately to know when a book could offer her the answers she sought, and as Fabien flipped through them, painfully and rarely year by year, he saw that she had given back to the books. Margin notes, written in her small neat hand, detailed why a certain herb worked better than others for dulling pain. Occasionally she’d crossed out the print and corrected it. (The smell of ink, it was home. Even the first time he’d stumbled into her home, bleeding and half-blind, he’d smelled the old pages and the dark ink and odd herbs and felt safe.)

It was three years before Fabien came across the diary. It was well-hidden, behind a false back in her least-used shelf. Perhaps, if he’d been paying more attention in those strange desperate months before, he would have noticed trails in the dust, he would have guessed she’d had secrets. Of course she’d had secrets, but there had never been the time to learn them. (He’d watch the king and all the court die with a smile, now, if he could just hold her head to his chest again.) 

The diary was not really a diary, he thought, technicalities always itching at the edge of his mind. It was a journal of medicinal recipes, occasionally interrupted with a personal note, a sketch of a flower, a line of a song. (She’d often hummed when they were alone. He only knew music when he had to pretend in some sordid place, but somehow melodies just escaped from her when she wasn’t looking. He’d touch her shoulder, interrupting her sketching, and ask her the tune and she would shake her head wryly, as if there had never been a song at all.) She’d kept this journal a long time: the first page was dated the year she turned 10, and the entry began with, “Today Papa said that if I was going to poke my head into his books I ought to learn to write properly. So I’m writing.” (He could almost hear her voice, pitched up with youth, teasing her father and begging for more ink.) The early entries were all just as matter-of-fact, detailing her quiet life before her father became the court physician. When she was twelve, she wrote, she’d saved a squirrel’s paw with careful stitches. That was when her father allowed her to help with midwife duties. “He said I might just be useful.” The letters were larger, perhaps with excitement, seemingly hurriedly scrawled. (Fabien blinked rapidly at the tears. Of course she’d wanted to be useful. She always had.)

He closed the book, too affected to keep reading. His eyes often got sore these days, too, and he shoved away the thought that Claudine would have known just the poultice. She had always known. 

It was a month before he could look at the journal again, and he skipped through the rest of her girlhood and adolescence. She was nineteen when her father became court doctor, and twenty when she saved the queen’s life. (Fabien had not realized that all along it had been her. Of course it had.) Here, her writing shifted abruptly. She’d learned a code to record court matters. It was a simple letter-reassignment but shifted a character every page, and he had to go slowly to keep track. 

He felt cold when he found the entry of the night after he’d been poisoned, which came after a neat copy in her hand of the poultice recipe for his eyes. “Monsieur Marchal gave me quite the fright as I walked in. The fool was lucky his constitution was so strong, or else he would have died. Though I am not sure yet the poison seems to be the same that my father ingested, though in a much smaller quantity. I have not seen the same symptoms yet — Papa did not display the same boils or swollen eyes. This is probably explained by simple quantity, as noted. Even so, whoever Marchal is sleeping with isn’t doing him any favors. I wish I hadn’t been wearing that abominable mustache.” Fabien read the entry three times, hearing her echoing through his mind, the faint underlying wit there even in print. (That night he dreamed of her death, as he had a hundred times before. As always, she choked before she could say much, before he could say what he needed to. He couldn’t comfort her. He never could. The dream changed to the child who had died in his lap in the woods, to the many men he’d tortured. He woke up in darkness and felt empty.)

He wanted to go back, to keep reading, but the dream was haunting. It hadn’t been so vivid in over a year. He took the the little journal from her home (thieves’ work, he thought wryly, her inflection tinging the mental words) and carried it in his jacket pocket, a talisman warding something away he could not quite identify. (Ink felt proper, there in his pocket, he thought of his family and of Claudine and, in strange fanciful light moments, felt safe even as he worked and killed in the name of France.) In another month, he was ready to read more. 

“Sure enough,” the next personal entry began, “I was right about the poison being the same. M. Marchal brought me a sample — see write-up of tests below. Strange sad man, looking so glum tonight. I suppose getting poisoned by a lover can’t be much fun.” Fabien surprised himself by snorting with laughter — strange sad man indeed, he thought. Right, as always. (He remembered handing her the poison, watching intellect shining behind her eyes. He remembered studying her hands as she combed through small glass vials and mixed their mysterious chemicals. She always had the demeanor of an alchemist, her tests done with scientific precision but underlaid with childlike curiosity.)

He turned the page. “Free of the mustache!!!” This entry was unaccompanied by any recipe or test write-up. A little scribble in the margin, less detailed than her usual sketch, showed a mustache with an arrow through it. This time, the laughter turned to tears. He clutched the book closed and held it to him, trying not to shake. He skimmed through Claudine’s carefully coded descriptions of Henriette’s death, her scientific wording carefully effacing anything she might have felt of the horror of those brief bloody days. Fabien had watched Claudine with admiration then. He admired her more now for her detailed observations. (If they’d been able to make a life together, he would never have spied again but the thought inevitably crept to the surface that she would have made a good spy, she would have been, in her own words, useful.)

He read on. Claudine had made note of every conversation they’d had; each time he brought a poisoning to her she had written it down. Her shorthand for him had remained the moniker Strange Sad Man, and each time he read himself through her eyes he felt torn open. The Strange Sad Man abbreviation, over the months that she kept notes, was gradually accompanied from time to time with a tiny flower drawing or a particular snatch of song. He could not read music but the words below it were old-fashioned and romantic. Grief, finally full-blown again after three years, threatened to swallow him. Her words echoed through him.

“Strange Sad Man called me a witch and stayed for supper.” (He had stared at her around his cloak, through her man’s jacket, longing to know more. He had kept his gloves on because he feared her touch.)  
“Strange Sad Man is averse to vegetables and wine, but not, at last, me. Or so I thought, he’s always tearing off for spying. But it’s a funny thing, love.” (He had gone numb when she was close, as if he’d fallen asleep in a patch of sunlight. Her words were too clever, she was always too clever, he could never stay.)

Each quip was surrounded by diagrams, formulas, tables of ingredients. Even her despair from leaving her position at court had been encompassed by her careful work. She had been keeping the most complete list of the poisons known to anyone, even beyond Fabien. And she knew more about Fabien than anyone else. Her notes proved it. He had never asked. And she could never have told. 

The last few pages were the most beautiful of all. Her flowering sketches of possible poison herbs decorated a detailed and scientific account of their first tryst, and love song lyrics twined around lists of ingredients to buy for her patients. Her color-coded charts demonstrated answers to investigations Fabien had only just begun to pursue. She had known. 

Her last entry was simple. “I’m quite sure of it. Fabien must know.” Her blood was on the page. (He wished, not for the first time, that it had been his. His thoughts spiraled in the familiar circles of guilt — he should have been there, he could have done more.)

Memory swallowed him whole. Her face was pale and her neck was bruised and she was holding the beads and gasping and he could only apologize. She was dead before he said “Forgive me.” He would be dead before he said “I love you.” And as he wept holding her little book filled with her lovely clever words, he realized she probably had forgiven him. 

He picked flowers for the first time in two years and visited her secret little grave. He tried his best at humming a tune but it sounded cold and unglamorous, too raspy in his voice. “It’s a funny thing, love,” he muttered to the flowers, and laid them down. She knew, of course.

**Author's Note:**

> Claudine never deserved to die and their love is perhaps the purest in this whole dang show help me


End file.
